“I trust it’s all in order.”
“Yes, sir,” Buddy whispered.
“Shall we sign the papers, then, and get you on your way? It’s getting late,” said Moors, pulling a pen from the same pocket that had held the contracts.
Moors signed, then Buddy did likewise, albeit with a shaky hand.
“Another beer and a handshake to conclude this business deal?” smiled Moors, capping and replacing his pen.
“That’d be great.”
Moors walked from the room, and Buddy stood, stretching his limbs as his brain screamed at him.
You just made more tonight than you have in the last year!
A smile spread across Buddy’s face as he imagined his next sales meeting.
Buddy bent to drop the papers into his briefcase, when he caught sight of the coffee cup Moors had emptied.
Dark maroon dregs clotted at the bottom, and a thin, pinkish film coated the rim.
For a reason unknown to him, Buddy put his nose to it, sniffed.
The rich, assertive aroma of coffee crept into his sinuses, but there was something underneath it.
Something metallic.
Moors came into the room with another beer, handed it to Buddy.
“Here’s to a great partnership,” said Buddy, raising his bottle to Moors and taking a long drink. “Bad water, huh?”
“Pardon me?”
Buddy jerked his finger back to the empty coffee cup on the table.
“Too much iron in the water. You should look into a softener.”
“An interesting suggestion. I will do that, since I’m quite sure I get enough iron in my diet already,” Moors smiled politely.
* * *
Back in his motel room, Buddy stripped down to his boxers, spread the contracts over the bed. The first several pages were standard, but the remaining six pages listed the modifications Moors wanted.
They ranged from having all of the caskets made of solid mahogany—unusual in this day of refrigerator-aluminum coffins—to having handles and locks inside the caskets.
Rather than upgrading their interiors, Moors wanted them stripped of all the plush satin pillows and upholstery and replaced with a quarter-inch thick lead pan secured to the bottom of the caskets’ interiors.
* * *
Two weeks later, orders from Moors were, literally, pouring in. Even though the original order of caskets had not been finished, Moors ordered thirty-seven more the next week and an additional forty-five after that. Taken in total with his first order, Moors had ordered more than three million dollars worth of caskets.
And Moors showed no signs of slowing. During Buddy’s last visit, Moors intimated that another, larger order was on the way for some interested European clients.
As Moors had warned, strange requests, too, began to come in, at least once an evening, phoned in by Moors himself, always at night. He demanded to have Buddy’s home phone number, and Buddy was only too happy to oblige.
After all, Carsten Moors was making him rich.
There had been the odd request for the double coffin—able to hold two bodies.
And the one that had to be wired for a stereo system.
And the thirty-seven child sized caskets.
Aside from these strange instructions, what really puzzled Buddy was that Moors was ordering all of these caskets, even though there was absolutely no construction going on at the mansion; nothing that would turn the wreck into a working mortuary.
Moors always assured Buddy that some work was going on, but the fact was that the first order of fifty-six caskets would be ready for delivery in three weeks.
And Moors still had no place of business.
Buddy had offered to store the caskets for Moors until the mortuary got up and running.
“I’ve given you my instructions.” Moors had told him, in a cold, controlled tone.
Buddy had never seen Moors angry, even though he’d asked other questions that had provoked irate responses from the man.
He began to worry that Moors might take the future business he always alluded to elsewhere.
Maybe, Buddy thought, it was time to do something for the client, something with a little flourish, a little panache.
Something that said Buddy J. Burnett and Hastings Casket Co. appreciated his business.
Buddy knew just the thing.
* * *
There was a moment in the parking lot of the Sears store when Buddy was afraid that the damned water softener was not going to fit in his car. But the salesperson wrestled the bulky box inside and tied the trunk shut around it.
He pulled onto the gravel road at around 8 p.m. The house was very quiet, and only a few dim yellow lights shone through the windows.
The box came out of the trunk far easier than it went in, and soon Buddy was hauling it step by step up to the front door.
When he’d made it up all of the steps, he paused to wipe his forehead with a handkerchief.
A flash of movement caught his eye from one of the ground-floor windows.
Squinting, he saw Moors inside dancing with a woman––swirling across a large, bare room that opened just to the rear of the sitting room where he and Moors always conducted their business. He’d never seen this room, though, because Moors always kept the door closed.
The woman wore a light blue cocktail dress and blue pumps with heels that were too high. Moors was dancing at an incredible pace, flinging the limp body of the woman around so fast they were both a blur.
But that was not what made Buddy’s pulse race, his mouth go dry.
From some wound on the woman’s body, blood jetted across the room in a dizzying arc, spraying the bare, white walls.
Then Moors, looking ecstatic, stopped, folded the woman’s body in his arms, and rammed his face ungracefully into her neck so hard that Buddy swore he heard a crunch.
Two tracks of blood ran down the back of the woman’s pale, delicate neck.
Pushing himself away from the window, Buddy fell against the porch railing.
With a crack like a broken bone, it gave way under his weight, and he fell to the ground with an impact that pushed the breath from him.
When he could think again, he found himself sitting in the darkness, clutching his chest and looking up at the porch.
Dear Lord. He killed her. Moors killed that woman.
Jumping up, he raced for the car, threw himself in without bothering to close the trunk.
As he started the car, he could swear that, in the upper floors, in the windows lit with smudgy yellow light, he saw the shapes of other people. Some of them moved within their rooms, some of them simply stared out the windows.
But some of them hunched over other shadow shapes, just as Moors had.
He managed to keep himself from throwing on the lights and squealing out of there—at least until he reached the front gate.
* * *
Once off the grounds of the mansion, he drove straight home. Back among familiar landscape, he relaxed, his heartbeat returning to something near normal.
Moors killed that woman, he thought. I saw him kill a woman.
However disturbing it was, it paled next to how he had killed her.
He shivered, tried to clear his mind of that ridiculous thought, but it was too late.
Moors is a vampire.
“No,” groaned Buddy aloud, rolling his eyes. “He probably didn’t even really kill her.”
Then, he thought of something that made his scalp tingle.
Buddy stomped the brake, and the car fishtailed to the side of the road, a procession of horn-blaring cars swerving as they passed him.
I left the water softener. He’s going to know I was there.
Shit. Shitshitshitshit!
“Shut the fuck up!” he screamed, lurching the car back onto the road and starting home again. “He’s not a vampire. There are no such things as vampires!”
Okay, all right, calm down. There are no such things as vampires.
He sure looked like he was sucking her blood.
He sure has ordered a lot of caskets.
He sure has asked for a lot of strange things to be done to those caskets.
He sure has a lot of empty room in that mansion, which, by the way, he shows no intention of really turning into a funeral home.
Oh, and that red stuff in his coffee cup? Do you still believe that was hard water?
“Christ, maybe … maybe he is. I mean, what would you do with all of those caskets if you’re not opening a mortuary?”
What about those other shadows in the windows?
What if Moors was buying caskets for other vampires—a sort of undead real-estate agent?
His heart began to beat fiercely again, and what was left of his cold blood evaporated.
If Moors is the real-estate agent then I’m his developer.
He made the turn into the driveway of his modest two-bedroom home, sat there for a spell feeling uncomfortably responsible for the death of that nameless woman.
What could I have done to stop him?
Nothing, the other voice said. He’d have killed you, too.
He shivered at that.
But you can prevent anyone else from being killed.
How?
Kill him.
Buddy thought of the money he was making … real money. A lot of very real money. And here he was thinking of getting rid of it because he thought he saw a vampire.
Then he remembered something else.
Hell, he’s already paid. I’ve got his money … and a referral to boot.
What the hell else does a good salesperson need?
Buddy smiled at that, until a vision came to him: the thirty-seven children’s caskets they were preparing to deliver, filled with thirty-seven tiny, pale-faced cherubs, each with rosy red cheeks and protruding canines, each grasping the handles inside their Hastings Caskets with doughy hands, opening the lids, coming out.
Coming out looking for someone to hold them.
Someone to warm them.
As he punched the garage door opener, he thought of the 138 caskets to be delivered to Moors in the next ten days.
And he had an idea.
Mr. Carsten Moors and his tenants were going to get another option installed in their caskets.
Courtesy of their salesperson, Mr. Buddy J. Burnett.
* * *
Three-thirty a.m., and the phone on the nightstand jangled him from sleep.
Still unconscious, he reached to answer it.
“Hello?” he answered, trying to sound groggy.
“Buddy,” hissed Carsten on the other end, sounding too cool, too refined and too polite. “Something a bit strange happened this evening.”
“What’s that?” asked Buddy, trying his best to keep his voice level and neutral.
“Someone dropped off a gift at my house tonight. A water softener.”
“Oh, you got that? Great!” Buddy’s pulse began to race as he waited for Moors’ answer.
“Thank you, Buddy. I’ll see that it’s installed soon. Tell me, did you, perhaps, deliver it yourself?”
At that, Buddy’s mouth went dry.
There was silence, then, on the line, during which Buddy was quite sure that his heart was thumping loud enough for Moors to hear.
“I think,” Moors began slowly, civilly, “that whoever delivered this lovely gift may have seen something this evening that shocked, even frightened him. I think this someone should keep his visit and what he saw quiet. If, that is, he’d like to keep his … contracts.”
“Other than that, the gift was quite thoughtful,” Moors said, the dark cloud underneath his tone dissipating. “Now, I have a few modifications I’d like to discuss, and the European order has come through.”
“Yes, sir,” Buddy said, swallowing, and in shock.
He knows, but he isn’t going to do anything, Buddy thought as he scribbled down Moors’ request and the new order. Because you can’t do anything to stop him.
Buddy smiled at that, kept scribbling.
* * *
“Here’s the daily list of changes,” said Buddy, pounding Jim on the back and slipping the papers into his free hand.
Jim, the plant manager, hadn’t looked forward to a morning since they got the first Moors contract. At the start of every day, Buddy visited him, like today, with a list of Moors’ recent requests—sometimes a single paper, sometimes a sheaf of papers.
Today, it was just a sheet.
“You gotta be shittin’ me!” Jim snorted as he scanned the list. “What’s this?”
“Just what it looks like. Can you do it?”
“Sure. I mean, I guess so,” Jim spluttered. “He wants these installed on all of them?”
“Yeah, even the ones we’ve already finished. Will it hold up delivery?”
“Probably not,” he answered sourly. “Not if we can find enough parts.”
“Well, hold everything until they’re all finished. He specifically requested that there be no partial shipments,” said Buddy.
“Oh, and by the way, Moors’ European contact called me the other day. We got the order in—a five million dollar contract.”
“Christ! You mean a five million dollar headache,” said Jim turning away.
Buddy laughed and shook his head as he left the plant.
* * *
In the bright light of the early morning Buddy could see the house’s imperfections with startling clarity, the way its shutters drooped, its paint flecked, its siding bowed.
Other than that, though, the house looked no different than it did four months earlier when he’d first been here in the evening. Moors had made no improvements.
Actually, this was the second time this week he’d been here. The first time, four days ago, Moors had signed the delivery papers and handed over a check for the entire European order.
Two days later, the caskets had arrived and been off-loaded into Moors’ house, all at night.
Now here he was sitting in an idling car wondering what the hell he was doing.
From the pocket of his jacket, he produced a small device that, at about the size of a cigarette lighter, fit snugly in the palm of his hand.
It had a single red button and a key chain that dangled from one end.
Imprinted on it, in tiny white letters, were the words:
“Open Sesame.”
Buddy remembered how he got the idea, thumbing the button on his garage door opener the night he fled from Moors’ mansion.
If he’s really a vampire, he needs the coffins to protect him—and his guests—from the sunlight.
If we install something to open those coffins during the day …
Actually, what they ended up installing were not garage door openers, but commercially available devices that could open a car’s trunk or doors by remote.
It had been the only modification Buddy had hovered over, making sure that Jim had it just right.
“No, no,” he’d told Jim. “The lids have to open completely. And all the receivers need to be set to the same code.”
Buddy prayed that Jim’s attention to detail held out.
He climbed the steps to the front porch, tested the door. As he thought, it was locked.
Walking casually around the porch, he fingered the device.
Then, he pushed the button.
The tiny red light illuminated.
Just to be sure, he pressed it again and again and again …
He didn’t know what to expect, but within seconds, he heard a chorus of high-pitched screams. Several of the windows on the upper floors shattered, sprinkling the porch with glass.
Then, more screams, some distant, some very clear, joined the chorus.
Buddy ran down the porch steps, still punching the button, and looked at the house. Through the upstairs windows, he could see flashes of light.
Just then, there came a terrific, cycling shriek, and one of the front windows on the lower floor exploded, a dark s
hape hurtling out of it, crashing through the porch railing.
It came to rest, twisted and charred, near the foot of the steps.
Buddy backed away, covering his mouth against the burning stench that rose from it.
It turned its head up to the light, and the burning began again, erasing its features.
Not before Buddy saw the unkempt blonde hair, the blunt face.
* * *
After the screams had died away, Buddy eased himself into the house through the broken window, pressing the tiny button continuously. He walked through the room where Moors and he always met, opened the door onto the room in which Moors’ had killed the woman.
The walls were covered with splotchy, rust-colored stains.
He found the refrigerator where Moors kept his beer and took one. Draining half the bottle in one breath, he spotted a telephone across the room.
The first call he made was to Jim at the plant.
“How did the old son of a bitch like ‘em?” Jim asked.
“Oh, well enough I suppose, though I doubt we’ll get any orders from him for a while. How are the European orders coming?”
“Not nearly as many changes as Moors made. Probably be ready in two weeks.”
“And the automatic openers?”
“All installed.”
Jim transferred him to accounting, where the secretary confirmed that the European check had cleared just that morning.
Buddy hung up the phone and pulled out his airline credit card.
“Hello, I need to book a flight to London,” he said when the agent answered the phone.
I may not be a great salesman, but I bet I’m the highest paid vampire killer in the world.
And the only one with referrals.
Best New Vampire Tales (Vol.1) Page 4
